Transcript for:
Islam's Role in Western Civilization

to start I actually want to start by uh admitting something which is so the title of this talk is how Islam saved Western Civilization for the record I believe that that is a totally accurate statement there's nothing I didn't this isn't an attempt to back away from that title at all the thing I want to admit is the title of this talk is how Islam saved Western Civilization I have nested a contradiction in the title that I'm going to show you later on purpose because I like to do things like that I it's just my nature so I just want you to know I'm admitting this right off the start um so to start this thing off though I also want to admit something else which is that I picked the title because there's a book that kind of inspired me but the book is deeply flawed and the book is how the Irish saved civilization I got the book I want to say like 22 years ago and I I hate doing this because I feel like it feels like I'm picking on somebody but the book is deeply flawed it's riddled with two contradictions in fact and the reason I'm bringing this off is because those are some of the contradictions I want to tease out in this talk so here's the premise of the book on September 4 476 A.D the Roman Empire collapsed it was a very sad day there was much lamenting and then the Irish safe civilization because the Irish had already converted to Christianity and Christianity of course is the core of civilization and so the Irish went to Europe and converted those awful Pagan Germanic tribesmen to Christianity and saved civilization in the process that's wrong on multiple levels the first and most obvious level is Rome didn't fall on September 4 476 A.D so if the whole idea is that the Irish safe civilization from collapse but it didn't collapse then were the premise is already shot out of the water who are already in trouble Rome fell May 29 1453 it's almost a thousand years later this is this isn't a small error this is a gigantic error so that's one problem another problem with the premise is the following most of the Germanic tribesmen were Christian so if the Irish are converting them to Christianity that's odd it's like when President William McKinley said we're Conquering the Philippines to make it Christian and they're you know like 80 of the Filipino population went were were catholic of course what McKinley meant was to make them Protestant but anyway that's a different story we're just going to genocide 800 000 of these folks and hopefully flip them over to protestantism didn't work um so this Con the second contradiction that they're going to convert the general act trisom into Christianity is actually shockingly similar to the McKinley thing I just brought up not all of the Germanic tribesmen had converted some of them were still Pagan but the ones that that had converted were the wrong kind of Christian that's what he really means in 325 A.D emperor Constantine decided that Christianity was too unwieldy of a religion it was it was too complicated too mysterious there were too many moving parts and it needed to be toned down a little bit in part to get rid of some of the contradictions like for example the Trinity it was driving everybody nuts right how does this work he's what and and so Constantine said I want 318 of you theologians to go to nicaea and figure out how to make Christianity into something a little bit more manageable because if Rome Rome had already majority it was already majority Christian at that point if if the Roman Empire is going to use Christianity as the state religion to manipulate people we we as the politician class need to be able to know what Christianity is how can we manipulate people through religion if we don't understand the religion so they get together at nicaea they they come up with a solution for the Trinity there were 30 gospels they threw 26 away they ordered them destroyed it didn't quite work uh we have the other 26. most of them were found in Egypt by a by a farmer who was in the desert digging out phosphorus and he hit a jar with his with his shovel and he heard it crack and he pulled the jar out and he saw these leather-bound books I think I want to say it was 46 47 and he pulls out the leather bomb books and he's like I don't know what these are but I know who will know and he went to the he was Muslim he went to the nearby Church the Coptic Orthodox church and he handed them to the priests and the priests went oh I know what these are these are the 26 Apocrypha and the church then immediately declared it a miracle that somehow the 26 Apocrypha had survived and the cop optic Church claims that all 30 Gospels are legit and rejects the rejection of the 26 Apocrypha Apocrypha means wrong right so it rejects the wrong the Declaration that they're wrong about nicaea the 318 also had a conversation about one other problem and the problem was how to understand Christ's nature on Earth if he was God then how did he manage sin for example there was a guy named Arius of Alexandria he was actually from karenike a long story he was living in Alexander that's why he made his career areas of Alexandria went here's my suggestion Jesus was God pure God total God as a result he was never tempted done no sin but the majority said no that's wrong Jesus was God in a man's body the body was tempted therefore he did experience what it would be like to be tempted but because he was God he overcame it and there was no sin that became Orthodox Doctrine the other part became heresy it's known as the Aryan heresy Aryan with an i not a y I is areas of of Alexandria why is the the horse people who conquered Indian Ireland um that's the area in heresy it took off in Egypt it took off in Syria and the Germanic tribesmen really liked it so that's what's being converted they're being taken away from the Aryan heresy into what we would we would have considered mainstream Christianity of course in the United States the average American Christian is an Aryan heretic I can prove it to you there is a Greek guy who wrote a book called The Last Temptation Of Christ his name was Nikos kazinsakis The Last Temptation Of Christ is Orthodox Christian belief Christ was tempted as a man but overcame it because he was God Americans went not when Scorsese turned this into a movie The French also went nuts they actually set a historical movie theater on fire while people were in it because they couldn't believe a movie that could be this heretical could be made when the reality was they were the Heretics that was that was the church's official belief I think that's hilarious all right fine it's a contradictions I want to tackle right this the assumptions that we go into these conversations with like oh the dramatic tribesmen are pagans and oh right and and the reality is it's way more complicated so to do that I want to start with a definition of Western Civilization I've covered this before in other lectures but I have to treat every lecture like a standalone so if you've heard me before forgive me for any redundancy I will try not to focus too much on this particular definition just because I've covered it in other lectures but but I still need to do this so if you take a college level course intro to Western civilization and for the record uh I'm a political scientist but uh history is obviously a thing of mine and I did teach for a few years with the University of Maryland uh University College and I did teach their intro to a western civilization class so I'm also telling you this as a person as a recovering uh intro to civilization professor usually every school is probably a little bit different because it depends on the textbook and the professor but usually the class starts in 5400 BC sorry 3400 BC or if you're like me and you reject BC because it's confusing 5 400 years ago and then um the class usually goes it depends again on the text and the professor but it usually goes to 1648 with the end of the 30 Years War which didn't end in 1648 and lasted about 50 years just for the record just so just to make things not work and then intro to Western Civ 2 usually starts in 1648 and goes to the present which I've always thought was remarkable because it shows our bias for the Contemporary period because we're going to take 5 000 years of History 5 400 years ago to 400 years ago and we're going to compress that into 16 weeks and then we're going to do three and a half centuries in in 16 weeks it seems like an unfair distribution we're literally giving the recent centuries 17 times the attention that we gave the old centures but okay set that aside for a moment odds are good that your professor will start this class with maybe one maybe two but probably one lecture on Mesopotamia and Sumer and the in the beginning of writing and then maybe the second lecture will briefly cover Egypt and then from there your professor is going to probably go on and spend a huge amount of time on the Greeks an enormous amount of time on the Romans and then the Middle East Middle Ages kick in maybe a lecture on the Middle Ages they lasted a thousand years maybe it gets a lecture and then there'll be a lecturer or two at the end of the class because the Italians go hey I have an idea let's do the Renaissance and that's a really exciting time period and then the class ends with the start with the completion of the 30 Years War when Protestants and Catholics Slaughter each other Wholesale in Europe um the 30 years war is one of my favorite Wars because Spain and Sweden fight each other you know what I mean they're just you almost don't need to know anything else about the war they fought three battles in Germany the Spanish Army and the Swedish army met in Germany and then they beat the crap out of each other for the record the swedes while they were in Germany plundered it sort of the Spanish of course you're in Germany come on Fred's gonna plunder and they stole a bunch of stuff from the city of Wurzburg and they took it back to Sweden and a bunch of that ended up in museums and the City of Wurzburg a few years ago sued Sweden to get their stuff back from 1648 and the European Union went now sorry too bad you lost it I thought wow why you ask well because if Stockholm had to return to Wurzburg it's plundered Goods then Berlin and London would have to return to Egypt and Iraq it's plundered Goods that would have been a catastrophic event for museums in Europe right one of my favorite museums on the planet is the pergamon museum it's in Berlin if you if you love anything to do with the Middle East it is amazing you have to go to the pergament in Berlin they have a whole greek temple that the Germans took out of turkey Stone by Stone they have the gates of Babylon that they took out of Iraq Stoned by Stone and they erected erected it inside a building specifically constructed to have these two Marvels inside them and in a way I'm grateful because you can go see it they're intact they're preserved in a way I'm horrified because these weren't German National Treasures I have actually been to the Temple of pergamon that's in Berlin in Turkey I've been to pergaman and there's like the you know where it is it's like wow so I've been to both I've seen where it's supposed to be and I've seen where it is haha the reason why I'm bringing up the class is because nested in it is a really interesting admission and then a massive omission the admission is that Western Civilization started on the banks of the Euphrates the Tigris and the Nile and then they're never talked about again that's it cover it for a week and then in the next 31 weeks we're going to talk about how amazing European civilization really was now obviously European civilization is amazing I mean I'm after all speaking a European language in North America you don't get here and Conquer two whole continents with at least not having a really strong propensity to violence you know what I mean there has to be something there it didn't just happen I'm I'm zero percent Native American 23andMe broke my heart I was really hoping I'd be like I could have my little Dances with Wolves fantasy just no so you know here we are shame um so there it's not to reject that there doesn't need to be a story about Europe it's to wonder about the question wait a minute you started in Sumer now I would have started in Sumer for a different reason I'm a political scientist I'm not a historian historians start in Sumer because 5 400 years ago is when they mostly agree there's a little bit of disagreement that that's when writing started what a historian is they're different from a political scientist the historian believes that Civilization starts with writing because a historian is a literary critic who does non-fiction the difference between a historian and an English major is English Majors do fiction historians do non-fiction so if there isn't something written there's nothing for historians to talk about I on the other hand don't care about that the only thing I care about is politics so I think government starts I think government starts civilization not writing in fact haha why did writing happen in the first place what happened was bureaucrats were trying to figure out how to keep track of how many cows they had how much wheat they had stored in the granaries how many swords they had how many horses they had and they went the politician class went to the bureaucrats and said you need to come up with some mechanism to keep track of all of this and so the bureaucrats began coming up with symbol sets for numbers and for items and over time those symbol sets evolved into writing in other words government had to come first the year is 6264. according to the ancient Egyptian calendar at some point an ancient Egyptian politician said you know what sucks that the farmers don't know what day to plant their crop every year if we made a calendar and kept track of when spring started that would really make our lives easier in other words even the Advent of the calendar isn't the start of civilization there was a government before that hahaha by the way just for the record the Egyptian calendar doesn't have leap years in it so it's off by 0.24 years it's actually 0.239 I think so in other words you need to do a leap year every four years but every 100 years you need to skip leap year but every thousand years you need to go ahead and do the leap year with a normally skipped so in the year 2000 we were supposed to skip that leap year but we weren't because it was the Thousand Year point so that was the that's why we went ahead and did it anyway really complicated but a lot of fun the ancient Egyptians because they don't have that their calendar is so old they're off by four years in other words a way to think of it is the first day of spring has rotated through every single day of their calendar four times so it's really the year 6260 not 64. I'm bringing that up because what that meant then was Farmers every four years had to actually move the date one day right because the start of spring and Egyptians were like people can keep track of that let's just move on this calendar will be to to wonky complicated otherwise Egypt probably created government about 6500 years ago so civilization in Egypt is probably about 6 500 years old we think that the Sumerians probably started government a couple of centuries later so the Sumerians beat Egypt to writing but the Egyptians beat Sumerians the government and the two of them were always really close to each other Whenever there was a development so it just kept whoever was first the other guy was second Sumer in Egypt they just kept flipping back and forth in developments hahaha so another way to look at this is Egypt was conquered by the Romans in 31 BC this is a pretty catastrophic event for agents at every level in part because the Romans were rough to give you an idea what I mean by the Romans were rough when Gaius Julius Kaiser the guy you incorrectly called Julius Caesar his first name was Gaius his last name was Julius his name that con that modified his last name was Kaiser yeah guys Julius Kaiser Julius is his his actual last name what what type of Julius was he he was a Kaiser Julius that that's how his name actually worked but anyway so the guy that you guys incorrectly called Julius Caesar um when he conquered Gaul today France he killed one million of the Celtic population living in Gulf they go how bad was that exactly there were three million Galls he murdered one third of the population he enslaved another million and then he turned and looked at the remaining million and went welcome to the Roman Empire sorry Republic because they hadn't quite yet made it an Empire right that that was the Roman way now the Romans varied and how cruel they were so when they got to Dacia they killed and enslaved everybody in fact they were so thorough about destroying Dacia you don't know where desha is it's effectively been erased from history I'll tell you where it is it's Romania as in the Romans erased it from existence and then named it after themselves and it still holds the new name when the Romans conquered Egypt they wanted to crush the Egyptian population so they did things like they banned Egyptians from owning land they banned Egyptians from riding horses they banned Egyptians from doing anything but wearing the color blue Egyptians had to always wear blue and the Romans did this because they knew that the Egyptian population was going to be complicated to rule over and then they were right the Egyptians kept rebelling so the Romans kept massacring them by mass crucifixions they were Romans left crucifixions and they were just crucify whole segments of the Egyptian population and then say look this is going to happen to you if you keep rebelling and of course the Egyptians just kept rebelling so if we decide that Egyptian civilization stopped abruptly in 31 BC I'm happy to do that for purposes of this conversation then by the time it got to 31 BC Egypt civilization was 4 000 years old another way to think of this is when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and went to the pyramids for the first time and gazed upon the pyramids the Giza Pyramids which were not the oldest pyramids right the sulcata pyramids are the oldest pyramids the Giza Pyramids are 200 years younger the Giza Pyramids were 2 300 years old for him so when he was looking at the pyramids he was going I can't believe this is 23 centuries old that's so insanely ancient he was 23 centuries ago he we are as far from Alexander the Great as the pyramids were from him just to give you a little sense of this in other words one lecture on Egypt seems probably inappropriate one lecture on Mesopotamia probably seems like a little too much if you're admitting that's the founding of your civilization that's a really strange thing you could do this as an exercise try to figure out your favorite musical instruments all of them and then look at who invented them about 85 90 percent of the musical instruments on the planet today were invented by the ancient Egyptians so if you're into music like how can you ignore that the rest were invented by Persians although the Mesopotamians invented the bagpipe do you want me to say that again it wasn't the counts when the Celts were migrating through Mesopotamia they heard the bagpipe and they went oh that is a nice sound they grabbed it and took it across North Africa and then invaded Europe one time I had a CD with bagpipe music I plugged it into my car I had a Irish friend Connor and he was in the car with me and I said listen to this and he's he's like this is really strange bagpipe music and I'm like do you like does it feel like Ireland he goes yeah a little bit it was Tunisian bagpipe music because the tunisians still play the back part because it never went away right so there are exceptions but here's another way of thinking of this this strangeness of the way the course is taught it's the equivalent of doing this having a course on English civilization and then you're going to make it a 32-week course because you're gonna have a part one and a part two and of course uh English civilization if you if you take the moment that the anglos and the and the Utes and the zaxons are invading invading Britain we're talking about a 1400 year old civilization the point where the angles take over is not 1100 years ago so I don't know do you want to do the point where they invaded or the point where they conquered a pick one go with it and then what you do is you cover the first part of English History all the way to 1776 in the first course and then in the second course you just actually no you wouldn't even cover it in the first you would you would do English history in the first course like the first maybe two weeks and then the rest of the course you just talk about the United States you just do 30 weeks of U.S history and at the end if somebody goes wait a minute I thought this was a course on English civilization you go we are England we are English civilization you well I mean yeah we're a piece of English civilization gone Rogue but what about England no no that's done they don't do that anymore they're not English we're English do you see how weird this is how could Western Civilization have been born in Egypt and Iraq and then suddenly vanished after being there for thousands of years that you don't even deign to have a conversation about when when Julius Caesar is massacring the Gauls Egypt is already 4 000 years old right Egypt had a civil war that won 170 years the United States is what 240 230 something depending on do you start it with Declaration of Independence or the moment the Constitution went into effect I've never figured out which one I want one of those two is right right I mean Egypt just has a sneeze that lasted almost as long as the United States has been around so so that's another weirdness about the conversation that we're going to have tonight is I I need you to reframe the way you think about this that this civilization that was birthed in the banks of the Tigris the Euphrates and the Nile can't possibly have stopped being there but if you've been listening to the news lately it gets really interesting because when Russia invaded Ukraine all I hear now is Russia almost accepted Western culture Russia almost accepted Western democracy the West is supporting Ukraine West West West it's the old conversation from the Cold War reborn again so we got to go back a little bit here before the Cold War to understand some terminology when the English were Conquering the world when the English were making the world England they didn't finish obviously they didn't finish they got 40 percent done and and they ran out of steam but 40 percent is amazing think about it that tiny itty bitty teeny weeny little Island where they boil their steak and Fry their tomatoes where it's always raining somehow conquered 40 of the planet I still can't wrap my mind around it they only ruled it for 200 years but still that's I don't know I don't even know what to make of that that's talent there was Talent there I'm not denying the talent just incredible talent because a lot of it wasn't violence right the English would plant a flag and the Indians are looking at it going what is that it's a flag what does it do it means we conquered you and the unions are like oh crap you mean if we had gotten to your tiny little island and planted the Indian flag we would have conquered you in the English were like yep that's how this works we we got you so there was a little bit of Psych psyching him out right that was also going on so when the English had done this they decided that they needed to make this idea of the East there needed to be this concept of the East the other the the nefarious the sneaky the mysterious the strange and so they came up with this idea of making the East being basically Asia and and then going from there now the Romans had this a little bit and the Greeks had this a little bit so it wasn't that the English made it up completely from their own minds for The Rook for the Greeks it was the Persians for the Romans it was still the Persians and so the English kind of had oh yeah this worked really well for the Greeks and the Romans we want to have this for ourselves so what they did was they named the far end of Asia the Far East they took the southern middle part of Asia and they called it the Middle East and then they took the Western end of Asia and they called it the near East because it was near Europe in other words what we call the Middle East was the near East what we call South Asia was the the Middle East the near East is what we call the Middle East today where we call South Asia today was the Middle East but then the Cold War started and we went we Americans went huh we can keep this East-West thing going but now we need the Russians to be the East because the East is evil and dangerous and exotic strange so we'll make the Russians the new near East and we'll do the Eastern Bloc States as the new near East but if that's the near East the then the Middle East can't be the near East anymore so we renamed the near East the Middle East but then we needed a new name for the old Middle East so we named it South Asia in our new naming scheme the Eastern Bloc States and the Soviet Union it never caught nobody started calling that the near East but they did call it the East and the Eastern Bloc in other words it partially worked it worked well enough it got what they wanted and now in a fact what they had done was they had successfully divorced East Germany East from Western civilization in the minds of people but this isn't the first time that they divorced that somebody has divorced Western Civilization from the minds of people we had already done it to Egypt and Iraq Ryan I just got through showing you that the West was founded in Egypt and Iraq and yet somehow we believe it's not in the West in fact even middle easterners will say it's not in the West it's part of everybody's understanding of the world now and this is of course at the heart of orientalism because the goal is to make it seem that the East is irrational it's inefficient it's it's authoritarian and the West is democratic and liberated and it everybody's happy it's all about ice cream we build it into everything so I don't know if you've ever watched The Man in the high tower it's probably not worth watching uh the first season is the first season was really really amazing but then after that it kind of falls apart a little bit and you could tell they just didn't know where to go but it's about what would have happened if Japan and Germany had won World War II and so it's really weird watching Americans walking around in SS uniforms you know Goose stepping around it's just like oh God so the first season the whole time you keep thinking oh this is horrific well not to ruin the story at any point for you in case you haven't seen it but at one point there is a good Japanese right that's a fun Trope good Japanese bad Japanese uh right we do this all the time good good Native American bad Native American yeah that's how we count though it's Downton Abbey everybody upstairs is wonderful some of the people downstairs are wonderful but some of the people downstairs are not wonderful because we all know there are good Lower Class People yeah they're scum lower class people but upper class people are all wonderful because the guy who wrote Downton Abbey of course is a member of the nobility and so it's a giant propaganda piece uh just just remember also he villainizes gay people which is interesting and Americans like this show so much um so um the I've lost my train of thought can you edit this the theories Middle East thing and then why did I get into Downton Abbey oh I know it was it was the the good Japanese the bad Japanese there we go so okay so there's a there's a there's this good Japanese guy and he's trying to figure out the mess that they're in because the Japanese are controlling California and they can barely hold on to it things are falling apart and they know that the Nazis are coming for them because right of course they are they're just of course that why would you make it ever anything with the Nazis they're eventually going to come for you they went for each other right the Nazis spent a huge chunk of their time killing each other trying to move up in rank so this Japanese guy I'm trying not to ruin this but there's a scene where he figures out what would have happened if Japan and Germany hadn't conquered the United States and what he sees is children licking ice cream and I thought really that's what you went to that was the big moment the big breakthrough moment there's balloons and there's children licking ice cream that's the difference that's the quantitative that was the qualitative difference that you saw between Nazism and what we have surely there's something more haha so now I need to get into the conversation of identity because a part of all of this is identity so a few years ago I had a conversation with a Christian Egyptian woman a Coptic woman and she said I'm an easterner and we in the east and I was like wow here we go she's saying I'm an easterner she's embraced this idea so now we need to get into identity we do something really interesting with identity identity is complicated and that's part of this problem because it's nested in the concept of Western Civilization so in other words when I talk about Western Civilization I can't help but also then talk about identity because it plays such a massive role in The Way We shape our conversations the way we understand who we are as individuals but also what we understand other people to be because this is part of the authorizing process so this identity conversation I want to I want to bring up something interesting and it'll seem weird because it but I but it but when you think about it it's the right thing to do especially since I brought up the Irish earlier just to be clear I'm not I I didn't like that book How the Irish say civilization I love the Irish so when the English start the next round of the troubles when they pull our Northern Ireland out of the EU and the Irish go now and stuff starts getting blown up and people start getting shot again because the English are idiots and they brexited I'm going to be on Ireland's side I just I'm outing myself right now when we talk about American presidents you will hear people say Kennedy is the first Irish president that's an interesting statement because it's a loaded statement he probably isn't and the reason I'm saying that is we we've had 46 presidents and 23 of them had Irish ancestry including Andrew Jackson and James K Polk and U.S Grant now I don't think three men walked around going I am irish-american but then when you say Kennedy's the first Irish president it's kind of weird because what are you saying that because they didn't identify as Irish first they're not Irish and what we really mean is Kennedy was the first Catholic President right you see see what I'm saying like for example if I told you Reagan was Irish does that come as a surprise if you're my age it probably doesn't because there was conversation about Reagan being Irish in the 80s because the Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill was also Irish and so there was this weird thing where there was this Catholic Irish Speaker of the House in this Protestant Irish president and they're hanging out in France and they were friends one was a Democrat one was a republican but they liked each other and they got bills passed they worked together so there was that conversation but since then I doubt very much there's been much of a conversation in fact Biden is Irish he's not only Irish but United States after a few Generations nobody's only one thing anyway you know what I mean you could try but yeah y'all ain't gonna succeed your children your grandchildren your great-grandchildren somebody is going to start mixed reading yeah this I promise you so we don't run around talking about Biden's irishness we still don't stop talking about Kennedy's irishness in fact Biden's the second Catholic President I the majority of Americans know this I think it's 60 percent but it's not an important conversation and in part because we're in a different place right the identity stuff has shifted a little bit the way the identity thing gets to Biden is his religiosity when Democrats are asked how religious is he by the way the majority of Republicans know he's a he's a Catholic 55 of Republicans I say yes Biden's a calf but when when people are asked is Biden religious 90 of Democrats say yes he's at least a little religious 45 of Republicans say yes in other words the way we us we stick identity on people has everything to do with the identity we hold for ourselves I mean I guess we could ask Biden it never occurred to anybody to ask Biden I guess because he would think he'd be the expert like the fact that we have to survey Americans and they all have an opinion that's also fascinating to me like how does everybody have an opinion did you do research did you look it up how did you how did you form you know what Biden's religiosity is how how did you figure this out like this mystery my point is that when we think of how we when we think of people we stick an identity marker on them and the identity markers can be really complicated because they can involve nationality they can involve religion they can involve race right and those identify identity markers that were important at one point might be not important later on and so in the mix when we have a conversation about western civilization and the west and then how we think of ourselves that's what this is also about and usually when we say the West we think of Athens and Rome and England and maybe even Germany and France reluctantly Spain and even though we think of Italy we're I'm sorry Rome we're probably a little iffy about Italy which is another contradiction in this thing right so let me give you an example what I mean by this so when I was taught the part where they talk about the steam engine I I'm probably remembering this incorrectly but I swear at one point probably third grade I I have it in my head and I'm probably wrong I was taught that Robert Fulton invented the steam engine now the funny thing about that of course is the steam engine was like a century old at that point so it'd be really hard for him to have invented the steam engine but it's the same type of story that we did with everything right Ben Franklin invented the glasses it's not true he didn't fit the class that Henry Ford invented the car again not true even the stuff that you think is true is probably wrong it looks like an i an Australian family did flight before the Wright brothers and an English guy definitely did the light bulb before editing in other words everything we were taught was wrong at that level but okay so then later on in my life as by the time I'm in college I was taught that the steam engine was invented by Thomas Savory and Thomas newcomen Savory did the first one and then newcomen did the next one and so you know you needed to mention both of them cool that's interesting but it's not true there was an Italian before Thomas Avery a guy named Giovanni branca who did a steam engine before here in fact there was a guy before him a Spaniard his name was Geronimo uh that uh uh um I'm having a covered brain moment they are I I am they Allianz II Beaumont well I think that's his name we're gonna go with that and he invented the steam engine like 200 years before Robert Fulton stuck one in a boat a hundred years before Thomas Avery and Thomas newcombin and honestly that's not the start of the steam engine either there was a Turk named takiyadin who invented the steam engine in 1551 60 years before the Spaniard did it in the Ottoman Empire in fact that's still not the birth of the steam engine the steam engine was made by a guy named heron heron was in the Library of Alexandria in Egypt and he made the steam engine 1 500 years before takiedi we've had the steam engine for two thousand years now now when I mentioned Heron I didn't say it I almost said it but I caught myself I almost said he was a Greek from Alexandria Egypt at The Great Library and invented the steam engine the reason I caught myself is because of the identity thing which I'm gonna I'm not done talking about but before I before I move away from her on I just want to point out what he did he made two steam engines in fact one of them was actually a static rocket and it just spun so he didn't just invent the steam engine he also invented the world's first ever rocket it didn't go anywhere but it was a rocket the other thing he did was he made a mechanical play with gears I was also taught that the gear was invented like 300 years ago but he 2 000 years ago made a play that actually had gears in it in fact we now have a thing called the anti-cathedral device the anticothelial device was found off the coast of anticipira is a metal box for the longest time archaeologists had no idea what to do with it somebody went what if we x-rayed it and they did it they x-rayed it it has gears in it the thing is 2 000 years old and then they figured out what it was well recently we finally figured out what this thing was it was a computer it was an analog computer a mechanical computer not a digital computer it wasn't electronic it had gears in it and what you would do is you would enter the date on the top and then it would rotate the constellations into place so it was an astronomical device computer so you could know what what constellations you would see that night think about how complicated it would have been to put that kind of data into the form of gears and then stick it into a box and make it work where you're putting something as complicated as a date into it by rotating the gears this is not nothing so Heron had this thing with gears in it with levers by the way with bells and whistles on it you would turn it on and then you would go sit down and watch and what the gears would do is it would cause the scenes to shift and you could have an object move across for example you could have waves and then a boat and then you could have sound effects with the the Bell and the whistle and the clacking and then the scene could shift because you had all these different things that would move into place and you could have a scene where a boat goes across the water and lands on the shore and a hero moves out in other words he invented a TV it was just a mechanical TV 2 000 years ago is that crazy is that crazy now I said already I almost admitted to you as Greek so let me tell you what why I'm telling you this so my uh my family from my father's mother so my grandmother's family or Finland svenskar that means a Swede from Finland so I was raised to believe I was a sweet because swedes are cool and I was raised to be racist against Finns is it racist are Finns a race anti-nationalists against Fitz there because Finns are a nation not a race so in other words I was taught Finn suck sweets are wonderful now here's the weird thing about Finland svenskar is there's swedes from Finland and the reason there were swedes in Finland is Sweden conquered Finland so they were the Nobles who went into rule Finnish land and peasantize the fence so they were not good guys and they ruled over Finland in this really nasty way for centuries and then in the Napoleonic Wars Sweden picked the wrong side and they sided with the French the French lost I don't know if you know that uh Napoleon Was Defeated and so as part of Sweden's punishment Russia took Finland from it the Russians then went to the swedes living in Finland and they said hey you guys know how to control these fins and rule them you already have your little fiefdom set up with Barons and dukes and counts and stuff you keep doing that but in our name and we'll leave you where you are and you just pay us taxes and the Finland Spence car went yeah it's a good deal so basically we lost nothing losing to you in the war and they're like yeah sure that's how you want to feel about it in other words the Finland Spence car are not the most popular people in Finland they're about six percent of the population and they're you know it's an ugly history I'm owning this I'm not going to try and sugarcoat or Gaslight you my ancestors were on the wrong side which is so we're clear until World War II and then we made up for it uh the sweets fought side by side with the fins against the Russians and All Is Forgiven and the fins and the swedes are like the bopsy twins of Europe now I don't know if you caught this in the news or a few months ago but the prime minister of Finland said we want to join NATO but we can't unless the swedes join and it's because Finland will never do anything without Sweden and Sweden will never do anything out without Finland and Sweden said we've we've been holding on our neutrality for a long time but if you need to join NATO and we think you do because the Russians are a real threat we have to join NATO to support you like that's how their relationship is they're very cute they should totally just get married and get it over with they are they're already married so in other words if I went to Finland even though there might be some latent resentment left I'm probably okay I'm not like scared or anything about it I took 23 in me don't Don't do 23 and me if you're a racist I'm just telling you right now you're gonna it's gonna upend your entire world view of yourself it turns out my grandmother was mostly Finnish it's like oh no like so now I have to cut oh I haven't spent years now trying to overcome my anti-finishness and embrace the fact that I'm more finished than Swedish but am I so she had a Swedish name she spoke Swedish she identified as Swedish it's just genetically she was mostly Finnish see how complicated this guy all of a sudden but now here's the really weird twist and it's why I'm bringing this up if you're a six percent minority in a place and you only want to breed with your own Nation it's going to get cousiny really fast you know what I mean you're probably doing your children and grandchildren a huge disservice at some point you're going to want to open up to the possibility of marrying into one of the locals and that's what my ancestors did so what I am is I'm paternally Swedish and I had a Swedish male ancestor who kept who married a Finn and then maybe he married a sweet that child married a Swede but then there were like two more fins and that and then a sweet again in other words as time went by we effectively became genetically Finnish because that Swedish DNA just kept shrinking every time there was a marriage to a local and that's what happened to Heron when the Greeks conquered Egypt 300 300 years before Heron's birth the Greeks definitely separated themselves out from the Egyptians because they saw the Egyptians as as inferior but after 15 Generations there was no way Heron wasn't part Egyptian in other words calling Heron the Greek scientists from Egypt is really an interesting proposition because how Greek was he how Egyptian was he after 15 Generations in Egypt how Greek were the Greeks if nothing else their culture was modified by the Egyptians they lived around their DNA was modified because you know they were marrying into them not Cleopatra but when I say when I said Cleopatra you went oh the Egyptian pharaoh the woman Cleopatra by the way it's the seventh I'm keeping track I know you all mostly aren't Cleopatra the seventh is the famous One Pacha the seventh that you identify as Egyptian with zero percent Egyptian so it her family tree is wonky and difficult because on two occasions she had an uncle Mary and niece so I don't know how to do this because I I can't count the generations back because what am I supposed to do with Denise Uncle thing twice so there's two ways to count it right you count seven generations because you count the niece as a separate generation or five generations and you make your life not a nightmare so I'm doing five if you go back five generations the way to do this is the math on this the math is fun and the really cool thing is just about everything in the universe can be described as map by math right you take two to the power of the generation you're trying to go to so you're zero Generations away from you two to the zero power is one your parents are one generation away from you two to the first power is two your grandparents are two away from you so two squared is four your great grandparents are two cubed that's eight by the time you go five generations back so three greats and then grandparents you end up with 32 ancestors you should have 32 great great grandparents she had four a Persian and three Greeks it's actually worse if you go one generation forward you go to the fourth generation she only had two and then when she got to the two that two had three kids one of the kids married his niece his niece was the product of his brother and sister so I don't even know where to go other than oh my God but notice what we do we go Cleopatra the Egyptian Heron the Greek Heron was definitely very Egyptian by the time we got to the First Century A.D Cleopatra was definitely very non-egyptian at all in any way shape or form because she had been so secluded from Egyptian culture because the Greeks looked down on the Egyptians so intensely that they went out of their way to inbreed to try to prevent Egyptian DNA from entering the Royal Family it's intense let me give you another example what I mean by this the guy who invented philosophy some people call him Talus Americans usually say dailies so I'm just going to say Haley's to make our lives easy thales the Greek philosopher who invented philosophy wasn't Greek he wasn't Greek Isn't that cool the guy who invented Greek philosophy wasn't Greek he lived in a Greek city the city was called melatos militos is today in Turkey he spoke Greek but he also spoke Phoenician because his family was from Lebanon they were Phoenicians they had moved to militos for business purposes he grew up in militos and then produced the world's first ever work of philosophy a book titled water is best a Phoenician invented philosophy in a Greek city in what is today turkey but when we think of dailies we think of a Greek when we think of Heron we think of a Greek when we think of Cleopatra we think of an Egyptian that's what I mean what we do is we have this tendency to be selective with how we apply our the identities and that gets all sorts of messy okay so now let's do this let's shift now that I've got you thinking about identity and how we're careless with it and now I want to now I want to found Western Civilization so what is it that makes something West and something not West so this is part of the reason why my title was meant to bring out contradictions the East-West Paradigm at some level is nonsensical because it assumes that there isn't connectivity and can with the other side and cultural sharing so at some level there is no Western Civilization that's a construct that's part of our imagination at another level there is a western civilization because there is a geographical region that had a lot more connection with other place than than with other places one way to think of this then would be if you made the Indus River the boundary for Western Civilization everything to the west of the Indus is Western Civilization but that doesn't mean everything to the east of the Indus is into civilization or is it Eastern civilization because if nothing else Indian civilization is so different from Korean or Japanese civilization right it's Preposterous actually to start lumping together about everything west of the Indus does have strong connectivity and here's why it's the Mediterranean when we think of bodies of water we usually think of them as dividers that's because of our bias the Pacific and the Atlantic are dividers because they're so big they really do divide the old world from the new world but the Mediterranean isn't a divider it's a connector it has the exact opposite role it's just small enough of a body of water that getting across it isn't too too difficult it's insulated enough that it does have tempests which are the Mediterranean Cyclones but they're never as intense as hurricanes the ancient world you just didn't sail during the Tempest season which was basically fall and winter you just stayed out of the Seas and yeah that way you can avoid it and so what ends up happening is the Mediterranean connects because it's a highway it's way easier to move goods and people by boat than it is by land land is a pain because you've got to build a road then you've got to maintain the road you've got to make wagons and the wheels are constantly breaking and you can hardly put anything in a wagon and then you have all these stupid animals you have to feed right and they get oh they need water or they'll die and right so if you're trying to get from Egypt to Morocco don't go my land go by sea you'll get there really fast it'll be very efficient and your life will be relatively easy so what ends up happening then is all the civilizations near and around the Mediterranean end up intimately connected together so if we if we accept that premise then yeah there is some regionalism to it even though at some level it's still a little bit of an artificial device in other words I'm admitting that we're we're maybe doing a little bit of a stretch here but let's do it anywhere for the sake of the exercise So Okay so we've accepted that it was born in in Iraq and Egypt and then we've created a geographical boundary for now we can talk about the elements so some of the elements of of Western Civilization tends to be that they were Western civilization was Pagan with pantheons the Egyptian Pantheon the Roman Pantheon the Greek pantheon the pantheon that went through the Fertile Crescent but then there's this other religion Judaism which was by the way he no theistic originally not monotheistic so it wasn't that the Jews said there was only one God monotheism says there's only one God the Jews said there is only one God for us y'all have a different God that's henotheism it's an important distinction it's not to say that there isn't some monotheism in Judaism today I'm talking about ancient Judaism they were henotheistic um a lot of Jews are still heenotheistic today um so in other words there was this henotheistic religion that then spawned off Christianity and then later on Judaism I'm sorry Islam so two two religions came off of this one religion and that's what we tend to think of as a western trait Christianity not the other two not Judaism and Islam so much but definitely Christianity although maybe Judaism is a little bit better accepted today but not for the bulk of European history right European histories Pilgrim after program after program after program until we get to the pilgrim of pogroms the Holocaust and then Europeans go okay I guess we should stop killing them but it's like this reluctant almost I've I miss it so if we accept that that's the religious background for this then there's the birth of government in Egypt there's a birth of writing and Sumer what are the other elements one of the other one one place you can look to is the 18th dynasty of Egypt the 18th dynasty of Egypt did something really remarkable one of the things it did was it actually started an Empire Egypt built the world's first Empire that stretched from one country to the next the 18th Dynasty conquered part of Libya they conquered caronayaka Eastern Libya they conquered the northern part of the Sudan they went into Palestine they went all the way into Syria and he created an Empire well imperialism is the history of Western Civilization so there's that element that's interesting the the 18th Dynasty also invented a uh convenience industry so for example you could write down on a stone they like to use uh Limestone slabs you could write down on a slab the the your laundry list and send your laundry and it would they would wash it and then they would bring it to you or you could put a grocery list and you could call them up on the phone no that's not right oh you enter it into your lap now that's not right either you would give the list to a boy and the boy would take it to the store he'd buy your groceries and bring them to you there was this entire giant apparatus built around convenience in the 18th Dynasty in Egypt they took history to a new level so by the end of the 18th Dynasty they did a better job of chronicling their events so that by the 19th Dynasty they were doing a really good job of it 18th Dynasty they were still figuring this out so they would for example one of the things that we know is tahit most III was an amazing photo oh because as a warrior he would lead his man into battle from the front line and he and he was a general and he commanded his men and he never lost the battle and we know that he was in 17 military campaigns because it chronicled all that by the way there were prolific writers they wrote poetry they wrote Love Letters they kept track of who lived where so they did their all they did a census there is a little town in Upper Egypt if you go there it's Darrell Medina where we know more about the people living in that town over the course of a 400 year span of time because we have their notes we have their love letters we have the Poetry they're writing each other we have their laundry lists and we have their grocery lists we know intimate details about where each person lived and What kind of Life they live we know more about them from 3 500 years ago than we know about Americans from 200 years ago in other words that's a hint of the kind of hyper chronicling that you all do now on social media what did you eat today all I got to do is look at your social media account I will know how's your dog doing you've told me that too what's the latest choreographed picture of the idyllic life you're leading where you were careful not to show the the factory in front of your front door by taking the picture in an angle so that all we saw was the sky and the trees it's all there make sure not to give anybody your address because they can Google Map it and they'll see the factory you know carefully choreographed fast forward make it uh 6th Century BC there's a guy named Cyrus the Great kurosh Persian in fact he's the guy who creates the Persian Empire when he does it he issues the world's first ever Bill of Rights when I say Bill of Rights you think Western Civilization there it is the Persians they beat everybody to it by the way just for the record that Bill of Rights that's almost 2 600 years old it's over 2500 years old almost 26 centuries van slavery human sacrifice and it guaranteed freedom of religion in fact it encouraged Freedom religion the Persians told everybody in the Empire if your temples are in disrepair we will fix it for you using Government funding so after the neo-babylonian Empire to conquer the Jews in Palestine and dragged some of those Jews to Babylon not to be slaves but to live in Babylon they were forcibly relocated to Babylon when when kurosh conquered Babylon he told the Jews no you can live anywhere you want we're not doing that anymore there's no there's no slavery in my Empire there's no forced living anywhere in my Empire and so a bunch of them wanted to go back to Palestine the Temple of Solomon had been destroyed by the neo-babylonians because they hated the Jews and they just wanted to hurt them so they tore down the Temple of Solomon and when they read the the Bill of Rights they go hey uh can we get a new Temple of Solomon qurash is like yes of course everybody gets their temples rebuilt and he said okay yeah show me the plans uh let's just say they added stuff from the original Temple for example they built a giant human-made Mesa and then put the second temple of Solomon on top and so kurosh is looking at it and he goes wait what that's that's a that's like a mountain a flat mountain the Babylonians tore that down I don't even know how anybody built it let alone tore it down and you guys are like yeah they really hated us and so kurosh goes well I we're gonna do it we promised you we'd do it we're gonna build it but I only know one people on Earth that can build mountains it'll be Persian gold but it's going to be Egyptian engineers and they went and grabbed Egyptian engineers and they built the temple mount with Persian gold and that's why kurosh is in the Bible thales shortly afterwards a few decades later invents philosophy militos it spreads it goes to Athens the Athenians fall in love with it a woman named aspasia teaches Socrates well I got left out of your stories didn't it socrates's teacher was a woman named aspasia the reason why that got left out of your history is because once we became Christian we didn't like the idea that women were teachers and leaders and so there was a systematic attempt to delete all the women leaders and all the women philosophers from the history textbooks and so if you look up aspasia you will find people saying yeah she may not have been real why would Socrates tell us that a mythical person taught him philosophy what's the point in even making up the story what's the likelihood that she wasn't real it's preposterous but it fits our patriarchal orientation the Persians and the Greeks are in this epic back and forth and eventually the Persians get bored with the Greeks and stop fighting them and then Alexander the Great conquers them out of the blue and this is this unbelievable event and then that Greek civilization starts to come apart and gets replaced by this Roman civilization and the Romans are amazing conquerors they take the Greek Phalanx they they upgrade it they turn it in the Roman legion the Persians eventually recover from the great conquest and now the new Clash is between the Persians and the Romans and it'll last 50 50 no yeah 53 BC when the Battle of Karachi until the rise of Islam when it ends so uh the Muslims start conquering Persia in 633 so 53 BC to 633 almost seven centuries the the Persians and the Romans fight it out brutal nasty knocked down drag out fights but in the middle of all of this there's one thing that's really powerful and important for our purposes and it's The Great Library one of the Greeks who went with Alexander and conquered the Persians his name was patola males Ptolemy the first so tear Ptolemy the Savior that's the title he took he goes and carves Egypt out of this Greek Empire when Alexander the Great dies because he thought Egypt was the best piece of real estate in Alexander's Empire and then he founds The Great Library the idea behind the great libraries it'll be the world's repository for information and what they're going to do is they're going to bring books from every society and every culture there and keep a copy and they're going to invent things the first thing on Earth called a museum was one of the buildings at The Great Library it was a museum for all the latest Advanced Tech there was no such thing as copyright the idea was that you could go to Alexandria visit the library see the museum see the advanced Tech and then build on it but then once you built on it you were supposed to bring your advances there so that the next generation of advances could be made based on yours that was the idea behind the museum not so you could stick art and ancient relics in it it was supposed to be so that the world could Advance technologically at its height The Great Library may have reached as many as a million books I actually think a million is probably the right number I've seen two million feel like that's too many I've seen 200 000 I feel like that's too few to give you an idea what a million books is the Library of Congress the United States Library of Congress reached the 1 million bookmark in 1905. so in terms of quantity of information The Great Library was on par with where we were in 1905. quality no but quantity yes because right by 1905 we had flights the light bulb and steam trains but remember heron he was at The Great Library so they had steam they just hadn't made trains yet if they had had a little bit more time they might have but they run out of time they run out of time because Rome converts to Christianity now this isn't me abashing Christianity I'm not a I'm not in the mood to bash anybody I just want to tell you the story because it's important that we acknowledge what happened as Rome switched to being Christian and dumped its pagan Roots it also started to slowly move away from this idea that it needed to be Advanced technologically and in 391 A.D it took that to the maximum level when Emperor theodosius issued a decree declaring that the Roman Empire was not it wasn't just that Christianity was the official religion it wasn't just that Christianity was the state's religion it was also the only religion non-christians were no longer welcome in the Empire Jews and pagans needed to convert or leave and when that happened the Archbishop of Alexandria Archbishop Theophilus issued his own decree asking the Christian population of Alexandria to to go ahead and get rid of the pagans and the Jews they went to the Jewish quarter Alexandria was the largest Jewish City on the planet Alexandria is where the septijuent was made so the second Greek the Ptolemy the second Ptolemy philadelphus had such a Jewish large Jewish population in Alexandria that couldn't speak Hebrew so they didn't know how to read their holy texts that he decided to commission a Greek translation of the Old Testament into Greek so that the greek-speaking Jews living in Alexandria would be able to access their holy texts so he he got 70-something rabbis we don't know the exact number and he made the septijuent which means 70. and the septiduit was because he had 70 rabbis translate the Old Testament so that it could weed out bias and error and they would merge the 70 translations into one so they could get an accurate translation we have since we see found the the Dead Sea Scrolls which are which were older but not by much I think they were two or three hundred years old so now we have the original Old Testament material in the original Hebrew and we've compared them you don't need to change your translations it septed you into spot on it was an amazing translation in other words he pulled it off the mob goes to the Jewish Corridor and just Begins massacring the Jews when they're done destroying the Jewish quarter which won't be inhabited again for another another 1500 years they then go and try to find the pagans the problem with the pagans is they were intermingled with the Christians so you just literally had to knock on doors and go you Pagan pretty much everybody is going to deny it so then you go who are your Pagan neighbors and then right now you can find out because right people will rat each other out it's hilarious um just ask just ask the yugoslavs when they decided to kill each other and Bosnia Herzegovina um her out they then go to The Great Library The Great Library was run by a woman named hypatia hypatia was wasn't actually technically a pagan she was she was a theist so she did believe that there was an entity that created the universe a single entity but she didn't think that anybody could know its nature so she rejected Christianity and but the majority of the students at The Great Library the majority of the professors of The Great Library were in fact pagan and so the mob decides to get rid of The Great Library and they destroy it but we as a society Get Lucky because before they destroyed it by a few decades there was a Persian Emperor who got jealous of The Great Library his name was shahpur shop were the Great shahpur wanted his own Great Library he defeats a Roman Emperor Valerian he captures two intact Roman Legions he sells one into slavery in China takes the money from the sale and then he uses that money and orders the Roman Legions to build him two brand new cities one of them is Gandhi shapur in Gandhi shipur he builds an academy that will be the Persian equivalent to The Great Library and he starts collecting books he's having trouble getting Roman books because the Romans and the Persians hate each other so much but he has he's having no trouble getting Chinese texts and Indian texts and so he's adding those to the Persian knowledge Lao Tzu he gets Lao Tzu one of the greatest philosophers in human history not not him but his books right that law too is 600 years earlier but he gets his books which is amazing because when chin the Great unifies India he bans Lao Tzu and starts wiping out lotsu's works but now there's a place for them to survive when the Great Library is burnt a group of Romans decide to recover and they do it at the Academy The Academy of Athens when they do this at the Academy of Athens um that gets banned so they get some of the books together at the Academy but Emperor Justinian goes nah we got rid of the Great Library we don't need an academy to replace it those Greek scholars in 529 when the academy is banned grab all their books they jump on a ship they head to Syria they cross Syria they get to what would roughly be the Iraq Syria border today it was roughly where the Roman Persian border was and they they approach the Persians and they say we want Asylum and the persons go yeah of course who would want to live under a Roman rule anyway these guys are crazy and they go yeah not for us only we want Asylum for our books and the Persians go to your books and they go yeah we're we're bringing everything we have left that hasn't been burnt by Christian mobs and the Persians go oh come with us and they take them to Gandhi shippur and they take all those books and they merge them in emperor khusro is the guy who does this so now at the great at Gandhi poor they have all these Roman and Greek and Egyptian works and they're sitting there with all these Chinese and Persian and Indian works and it kind of recovered the loss of The Great Library a little bit Rome and Persia keep fighting they do one giant slug Fest in the early 600s nasty brutal Affair the Persians capture turkey Syria Palestine Egypt there are the it looks like Rome is going to go down in a ball of flames but the Romans somehow where get out of it in part because one of the Persian generals uh decides to Rebel he takes the chunk of Rome that he captured he creates a third Little Empire eventually he invades Persia overthrows the Persian Emperor becomes the new Persian Emperor and is stabbed to death a few days later and the Romans are like wow because military was touching go there for a while and then something amazing happens there's a new religion and it's Islam the prophet Muhammad dies in 632. that year the Khalif his follower the first ruler after the prophet orders that the Arabian Peninsula be conquered and unified for the first time in Arab history the Arabian Peninsula was ruled by a single state within a year that same year 633 Abu Bakr launches two armies at the same time simultaneously one into the Persian Empire one into the Roman Empire outnumbered outmanned out technology there's no way the Arabs should Prevail within a few decades they completely conquer the Persian Empire it was 1200 years old at that point can you imagine a 1200 year old Empire you can't comprehend it not being there they bring the Romans to their knees they don't finish them off but by the time they're done so from 6 33 the moment they start the Conquering to 7-Eleven the moment they've conquered Spain they owned everything from Pakistan to Spain and Central Asia they built the largest Empire in human history in just a few decades sixty percent of the world's Christian population the Empire itself is two percent Muslim but it owns sixty percent of the world's Christians it was an Empire of Buddhists and Hindus there were even some pagans hanging around and zoroastrians the Arabs were a strange conqueror population because they weren't forcibly converting people by the sword they weren't Mass genociding whole populations they weren't enslaving one-third of Gaul they did fight in France just for the record uh seven seven twenty five that's the year stuck in my head it's probably wrong uh the Battle of tour also known as a battle of Poitier against Charles Mattel and the French win just for the record but the Arabs as they were retreating carved off narbone and continue to rule a piece of France for a few centuries these Arabs were actually shot or humble so when they conquered Persia they went to the Persians and they went dude we don't know how to run an Empire this is way over at pay grade we we've never we just started ruling ourselves we we don't know what we're doing here you guys are amazing at this what we need you to do is keep running the empire we don't even know how to mint coins the first Arab coins show three men standing next to each other they're holding a cross in one hand and a a globe with a cross sticking out of it so they got a cross in both hands because they took the Roman mint and they just began counterfeiting Roman coins in fact the word felous which is the word for money comes from the Roman Folles which was one of the coins that they were counterfeiting those Arabs walked into Gandhi Shakur after conquering it and they turned to the Persians and they went what's that and the Persians go it's an academy the Arabs go cool what is that they go it's a repository of all the knowledge of the world that we that we know of and the Arabs go show us and the Persians go what choice do we have take them in the Arabs go teach us and the pressures go what choice do we have we will it takes a while it doesn't happen right away but in the 8th Century al-kindi begins converting these texts from Greek to Arabic and that's a huge leap because now it means a larger portion of the population can start to read them a guy named a Persian a Muslim Persian in the Arab Empire decides to start focusing heavily on Hindu mathematics me in vance algebra and Arabic numerals so the next time you're doing math remember to thank Al horazmi that you're not using an abacus to do Roman numerals which are impossible really try set up normal Roman numerals put a minus sign under and try and subtract Roman numerals from Roman numerals you'll tear your hair out forget multiplication and division creates a math system that you can work on he's so Advanced he invents algorithms 1200 years ago in fact algorithm was the Roman attempt to say his name algorithm so every time you say algorithm you're actually saying this Persian philosopher's name then in the 10th Century there's a guy named farabi the Romans call them farabius or al-farabius because the Arabs called them al-farami realized that he had a problem he wanted to talk about everything and anything under the sun he wanted no limits he was a polymath he wanted to talk about psychology and politics he wanted to do astronomy he he wanted to do religion he knew he was eventually going to step on somebody's toes and he was going to get it so what he did was he put made he wrote all the books he wanted to and then he put it in his will that when he died they would get published and so as a result we don't really know as much about them because during his lifetime he spent it as like a gardener and what he would do is he would Garden at the palace and he would listen to all the political conversations inside pretending that he's tending to the Roses or something but in reality he was writing it all down he's going to ask really strange questions questions that maybe not many folks had asked before so when the Persians made their empire they did something completely unexpected completely bizarre when you would get conquered by a kurosh the great or subsequent Persians you weren't subjugated enslaved you became a partner of the empire in other words you were you were in a good place being conquered it wasn't that horrible which is strange because that's usually not how it is in fact kurosh insisted on the diversity being held up if you go to pass the police if you go to Persia I went in 2002 it's fantastic good luck getting a Visa it was a nightmare I didn't like I'll never try again it's not going to happen I give up but if I could go again I would definitely do it when you get to talk to Jamshed there's walls that show people in every kind of dress imaginable because it's a celebration of the Nations the Romans erected a monument to the massacre of the dacians I'm pretty sure that in Rome there is the only Monument commemorating genocide it's still there you can go see it it's in your art textbook your art history textbook they show you the bottom Parts they never show you the top because the bottom parts of the tower show the the Roman army getting getting together to go and everybody's excited about that at the top it shows the genocide the Arabs are like the Persians they they didn't reject the different cultures they didn't reject the different religions they embraced them and they accepted them and they said yeah cool keep doing your thing if you want to convert do it in other words this wasn't a forced Empire like so many empires in our history al-farabi asks a question though that throws everybody off because so if I say you're tolerant that doesn't mean you love the other guy we should be a tolerant Society that's a really low bar right tolerant is yeah the world would be better if you weren't here but I guess I'll tolerate you that's not especially amazing when a person says I'm tolerant of others what I what I think would be really amazing is if you said I really love others that's a different level and I'll follow me asks that question and he does it in a way that makes everybody uncomfortable so the first two names of God God has 99 days 99 Names the the beneficence and the merciful and it's pure Mercy it's not human Mercy right where you surrender to me and I'm like I could kill you but I guess I won't not that it's pure Mercy the 50th name is al-haq which means the truth al-farabi asks the most annoying question ever if God is beneficient and he's merciful then why on Earth are only 20 of the world's population Christians Jews and Muslims because in Islam right it's built in that Christians Jews and Muslims can get to heaven in fact they expanded it to include zoroastrians what about the other 80 percent did God set them up to fail it's not their fault that they don't know about the three abrahamic religions so is God condemning them to all eternity and how this is why he couldn't publish while he was alive and then he goes I have no choice but to believe that God gave Hindus Hinduism and God gave so austrians or austrianism and God gave Buddhist Buddhism but if God is al-haq if he's the truth he can't possibly have lied to them therefore every religion must have access to Heaven therefore every religion should get equal respect in fact he went one step further and said when you think about it then the only way to truly know God would be to know every religion he starts a whole movement the sufis the sufis go oh wow that's amazing no bounds on what we can study we can go learn yoga from India and bring it back wasn't just the polymath he was a genius and the way I can be certain in that statement was because of the following so there's another Persian his name is IBN Cena says to us that I read Aristotle 40 times now he didn't read Aristotle 40 times we actually don't know how many times he read him I read Aristotle 40 times was an idiom it meant I memorized Aristotle word for word when he said I read Aristotle 40 times what he meant was you can tell me the politics page five third chapter and he could tell it to you word for word he had the text memorized in his hat he said after saying this I don't know what it says I'm sure there's some incredible genius here I can't tap into it the words don't make sense the reason the words didn't make sense was they were idiomatic that is to say Aristotle taught in idioms well he taught in idioms that by the First Century A.D were now a thousand years old and even the Greeks didn't know those idioms so it wasn't like the Arabs could go to the Greeks and go dude what does this idiom mean because the language had evolved and those idioms were forgotten so whether you read it in the original Greek or you read it in al-kindy's Translation either way you still didn't know what the idioms meant nobody did even the Greeks couldn't read Aristotle and so they're stumped they don't know what to do and then goes I know there's a genius in here I gotta tap into it how do I tap into it one day he's in the books book section of the bazaar and he passes by a book and it says it's written by far away it says idiomatic translation of Aristotle al-farabi would read an idiom try to guess what it meant he'd plug it in see if it worked if it didn't work he'd come back try a different one and he kept doing this until he decoded the idioms and he realized what each idiom meant and now you could know Aristotle and what he was saying imminent Cena reads this figures out what the idioms are he already has the text memorized they've been seen us suddenly instantly knows Aristotle and he goes nuts what he realizes is that Aristotle is on to something about the nature of the universe so Aristotle says so I guess I have to tell you what Plato says Plato says that there's three realities this is the reality we experience so this floor that wall the chair my suit me but that's not the real real the real real the real or real is what's in my head so my imagination of a chair is realer than an actual chair my understanding of the wall is it better is better than the actual wall and he goes but that's not the real real either reality exists in a plane of existence that he calls the forms or the idios and so what happens is if I'm going to make a chair I I my mind reaches up into the edius grabs the true chair brings it into my head but it's a copy copy is Never As Good As the original and then my hands take the copy in my head and make a physical copy so the chair that chair is a copy of the copy of the real thing Aristotle reads this and goes oh my God what a bunch of nonsense what even is that it's nonsensical Aristotle says no the chair is a collection of essences this chair is black so it has black Essence it's plastic so it has plastic Essence it's shaped in a specific way it has chair essence that a thing is a series of essences those Essences are actually information for example there might be a scratch on that chair and in the shape of the chair itself is information and the molecular construction he didn't have the concept of molecules but they did have the concept of atoms the the construction the material in there that's also information but he takes it one step further he goes so when that chair was originally made it was not perfect but it was close to perfect because it probably didn't have any scratches on it it didn't have any damage it didn't have any wear and tear on it but then as time goes by more information is added to the chair because it gets bumped and it gets scratched in other words there's a relationship between information and time take me for example when I was born I was a lot easier to describe in part because I was a lot smaller but also I had fewer scars and there was a lot less information in my head so the description of me was really easy But as time goes forward the description of me becomes more and more complicated until finally I die and my cells break apart and Decay back into the Earth the description of me becomes extraordinarily complicated at that point in other words as time goes by the universe increases the amount of information and then he goes oh wow what if we ran the clock backwards so instead of us thinking about the future where there's more information if we go back there's less and less information and he goes okay so at some point we reach a moment where there's the minimum amount of information necessary for the universe itself to unravel from that moment he calls that point in time and that information packet necessary being in other words a thousand years ago described Big Bang and singularities and entropy also that was not a major achievement for him his real achievement was he's the guy who invented modern medicine so if you look him up it'll say the father of modern medicine some of you'll get confused and go I thought Hippocrates was the father of medicine yeah because you're forgetting I said modern I didn't say medicine I said modern medicine medicine looked like this there was disease and the way disease affected you it was based on did you eat fish and drink milk and did a black cat walk in front of you was Jupiter in alignment with Saturn if so when disease hits you you're going to bleed from the eyes and have uncontrollable bowel movements if nasima walks up and goes this is nonsense what are you talking about there isn't disease there's diseases they're all different and they have different transmission vectors so one disease you sneeze on it you get it another disease you touch fecal matter and you get it another disease is bloodborne another disease is it comes by insects another disease comes from from rats in other words what we need to do is we need to think about the transmission vectors in his book here you go tip means law q a n u n so if you're if you're in physics and they say you need to read the Canon Canon c-a-n-o-n not c-a-m-n-n-o-n means law because it's an Arabic word you're using an Arabic word is q a n-u-n it doesn't have to be but that's how I'm spelling it it could be with two o's or so the Canon of medicine is the book he writes in it he includes hundreds of cures we still use a bunch of those cures today in Europe and and the Middle East his book is still necessary reading in medical school but that's not what's interesting about him here's what he says he says you know what's better than all these cures I stuck in here prevention your goal is not to get the disease to begin with if you cannot get the disease that's way better than getting the disease risking dying and getting cured and then dealing with the side effects of the disease later that's why he's the father of modern medicine he's that guy who said interrupt the transmission vectors so when I was taught this in school I was taught that semelvice the Hungarian figured this out yes some advice to Hungarian figured it out again 800 years after ebnissino figured it out first IBN Cena had a contemporary his name was imnal haitham actually for the record neither guy was actually called uh their names were shockingly similar and so it's it's hard to keep them apart so we just went screw it we're just going to use the last parts of their names which is like their grandfather's name and we're just going to reject the rest of it so that I don't have to remember which Abu Ali I'm talking about and we can move on was from Iraq he was from Basra he ended up uh uh by the way al-farabi actually was a student of ishak after Baghdad was created uh that became the repository of knowledge but that was the center of it all and ishak was a Christian Arab and I just thought I'd throw that in there because I want to make sure that I didn't ignore the fact that this isn't just a Muslim project this was also a Christian and for that matter there were Jews involved in this as well because right this was a tolerant society that embraced the differences and allowed them to thrive and so uh imnal haitham goes to Cairo and he starts working at al-azhar as a professor Alaska was a brand new school and mosque in a brand new city Cairo is like the baby of the of the Middle East it's only a thousand years old which is a joke for age right everybody's like oh Cairo so young it's such a noob and so even though haitham is right there at the beginning and he writes a book which in 1021 is the book of Optics we think ibnel haitham wrote 120 books we we have 30 of them we're missing 90. the of the 30 that we have they're almost on all on mathematics he was a mathematical genius he started doing calculus before anybody so yeah sorry it wasn't live in its or noon it was ibnel haitham um he's the guy who came up with the scientific method so when I was a kid I was taught I was either Galileo or I was Francis Bacon Galileo Galileo Maybe did something cool with cannonballs at the top Leaning Tower of Pisa I don't know Gala Galileo Galilei I mispronounced his name um it's probably apocryphal it probably didn't really happen but if he did do the Cannonball thing that's all sorts of fun because you just say Look Out Below and then he drops cannonballs and the reason he did it was he was trying to prove whether or not Aristotle's assumptions about the heavier object will hit the ground first was true or not and of course they saw the two objects hit the ground at the same time he had a solid Cannonball and a hollow Cannonball so if Aristotle was right the solid one would hit first yeah style wasn't right well but he was kind of but that's too complicated we don't need to do that it turns out it is true the heavier object will hit first it's just the cannonballs relative to the size of the Earth who cares so the only way you can measure the heavier one hitting first is if you had lasers sophisticated enough to pick up the the nanosecond difference between contact in other words if I had an object the size of the Moon an object size of Mars and I ran them towards the Earth the more size object would hit first but anyway that's because of the way gravity Works um so it was imminental item he had a six-step method for the scientific method he's the guy who figured out the lens I'm very grateful every day I wake up I go thank you and I put them on he reinvented the camera obscura Lao Tzu invented the world's first camera obscura but his material was just largely destroyed and not enough of it made it through if no heightam reinvented the camera obscura during this time period actually before this time period around the year 800 the Arabs invented modern agriculture the way they did that was they de-pesentized the population of farmers that they had inherited when they conquered the Persian and Roman Empires and they created private property with the hope that then the peasants who were now free who now owned their own land could do whatever they wanted to with it they would experiment and they'd figure out the best ways to do agriculture instead of just doing the same old thing over and over again in other words the incentive of profit motivation might trigger something and it does one of the things that they figure out is crop rotation they're the guys who invent that they also realize don't keep planting the same crop over and over again what if there's a blight what if there's an insect plague you're reliant on one food makes you dangerously at the mercy of that food and so you need to have Diversified crops so one of the things the Arabs did was they went around looking for new things to grow and they're the guys who start the coffee industry they take these beans that they find in Ethiopia that they realize they can do something with and they bring them to Yemen and they plant them in the province of Yemen named mocha and start the coffee industry they also realize you can pack fresh food on a ship and send it to the other side of Asia all you had to do is pack it full of ice and so they were sending fresh food to China and India by packing ships full of ice they had Plumbing and by Plumbing I mean fresh water was pumped in sewage water was pumped out they invented water wheels to make the pumping work so you could just use the power of a river to run your pump they lit up their streets at night so in other words if you walk down the streets of Baghdad a thousand years ago as you're walking down that street at night there were oil lamps in other words if I took a satellite and I put it in orbit around the Earth a thousand years ago and I stuck it so it was always at night so I'd see the whole planet at night photographed it the whole planet's pitch dark except for everything from Iraq to Pakistan the night the cities twinkled like they do now haitham speculated that all objects in the universe exerted gravity I don't know how you observe that I mean I get that the floor is exerting gravity over me but he said all objects how's the wall pulling me I don't experience that he also said light has a finite speed and it travels in waves his book of Optics was 10 21 this was a thousand and one years ago they dabbled in psychology comes along says it's okay to read history but you need to be a skeptic historians lie don't believe everything you read don't read Herodotus and take him at his word because he's a liar we we need to think about what he's saying and ask why is he saying what he's saying he also says we should have a systematic study of politics and sociology and demographics in other words he's the inventor of the social sciences including their little separate categories in other words he's the founder of political science maimonides is a Jewish Arab from Spain he'll laments the death of Hebrew so Hebrew died harder than Latin died I can learn Latin I can learn the vocabulary I can learn the grammar and I can have a conversation with you when Hebrew died they lost a lot of vocabulary and they lost the grammar system they kind of vaguely knew what the grammar system ought to look like because they had holy texts but it wasn't enough it wasn't enough to reconstruct the language it wasn't enough to learn it and speak it so here's what maimonides did he realized that Hebrew and Arabic were very close cousins maybe brother and sister actually so he took Arabic grammar he studied it until he understood it he took Arabic grammar he took he took the Hebrew vocabulary that they had from the holy text he plugged it in and then whenever he was missing a word he just grabbed the Arabic word and stuck it in and he brought Hebrew back which is unbelievable name another language that was resurrected from death I don't know one languages die that's it they're finished except for Hebrew that's that time period so notice the dates though we are told that the Dark Ages start when Rome falls on September 476 A.D I told you at the beginning rum didn't fall that day it fell May 29 1453. how do I know on that date in September in 476 all that happened was Romulus Augustus the Western Roman Emperor took off his purple robes stuck it in a box with a note sent it to Emperor Xeno the Eastern Roman Emperor and said there's no reason for two Emperors let's just do one you're it I abdicate that's not the same as Rome fell on May 29 1453 ottoman soldiers entered Constantinople the Roman capital and captured it and Rome ceased to own any real estate that's when a state Falls is when it doesn't own real estate that's how I know Rome didn't fall that moment but what we are told is that the Dark Ages the Middle Ages the medieval period starts with the fall of Rome in 476 and doesn't end until sometime around 1492 that it lasts a thousand years there's a thousand years without knowledge but I just showed you that there was actually extraordinary developments that were taking place including calculus 600 years before Newton ibnel haitham stated Newton's first law of motion 600 years before Newton he he actually described Kepler's first law of planetary motion 500 years before Kepler one I was working on my gr my graduate degree I started to get into Heidegger who is very controversial but that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with a bath water he was a Nazi for 11 months bad Heidegger bad he denounced the Nazi party after 11 months and said you're all a bunch of charlatans I reject you and then he spent the rest of World War II as an outcast but still that 11 months were gross uh he got his Professor fired and then took his job his Professor was that guy named hussarel he was Jewish I I'm doing this because I just don't want anybody to be confused about why I'm reading hiding her I'm reading Heidegger and I realized something in his bibliography he's quoting ibnel haitham and ibna and at the time I didn't know who they were so I went who are these guys when he was quoting IBN the reason he was quoting him is because his teacher whose sorrow who by the way was brilliant he shouldn't have fired him this is ugly who sorrow had taken Hegel and IBN Cena and merged them and created a new branch of philosophy called phenomenology so when Heidegger was taking his thing on being in time to the next level he was building off of that and then of course um that became the moment when philosophy in the world completely changed everybody who hates Heidegger is still a heidogarian There's No Going Back Heidegger changed philosophy grabbed it he shook it he flipped it upside down and he redid it but part of its inspiration for this was that conversation I had with you earlier about IBN Cena and the nature of the universe he took and built on that and then changed philosophy forever so even though the guy was a thousand-year-old thinker he was still playing a major role a hundred years ago and changing the way we do philosophy in other words there's no separation between any of this it's all connected together one last thing so the Arabs had idiomatically translated Aristotle into Arabic when the Spanish were conquering Spain from the Muslims they kept encountering libraries the popes kept issuing edicts to burn all the books just like when they had burnt The Great Library and just when they shut down the Academy of Athens they wanted to continue this the thinking went you only need one book it's the Bible why are we doing the science stuff we don't need this what we need to do is Purge the libraries of all these books that make me feel uncomfortable oh no that's now oh wait no that was then too it's so confusing how nothing changes we don't learn well the monks who were set us who were ordered to destroy the books were the benedictines and the Dominican monks the benedictines and the Dominican monks didn't obey the order what they did was they dug giant underground libraries beneath their monasteries when they would show up to the place with the Muslim library that they had to burn they would read they would have a guy read they had a guy who would stand here and they had the book they would turn the book so it was facing him so he could read it he was a human card catalog he knew the list the names of all the books they had in their secret underground Library so as you would walk by he'd read it if he recognized the book he'd give you one signal and you'd dump it in a pile in the middle of the town he give if he didn't recognize it he'd give you another signal and you'd walk over to a cart where they had a hidden panel and you'd Slide the book into that and then you'd walk back and you'd go grab another book and then he'd carry it so that that guy could read it and oh that one goes in this pile and then afterwards they'd set that pile on fire so they could show everybody they were burning the books and then they'd sneak the other books into their underground Library where they were busy translating it from Arabic into ancient Greek and Latin and that's how we have Plato and Aristotle we would have lost it all because the Christians were going around burning everything what happened that was not only did the Benedictine and the Dominican monks have a second second thoughts about this and refused to follow their orders it's good to not follow orders sometimes but the Italians went you know what I miss the good old days when we had science and math and philosophy why don't we do that again and sometime around 1300 they do the Renaissance 1300 the Crusades end in 1291. after the Crusaders start coming back they go you know what we saw when we were there murdering all those Muslims and Jews they had indoor plumbing and Medicine and crop rotation they're talking about things have gravity and that light has a finite speed and that the Universe originates from a point of information and the Italians go oh wow that's so cool let's do that here isn't that crazy all right let's do q a for a few minutes and then and then we have to go absolutely okay so the question is does the Arabs being in Sicily for two centuries have an impact on the creation of the Renaissance the answer is yeah there was a guy named Frederick II he happens to be one of my favorite ever rollers so the Vikings conquer northern France at one point they renamed northern France after themselves they were the northmen Nordman Norseman they rename it after themselves they call they were called the Normans they call it Normandy the Normans at some point get really bored they're like dude I'm sick of watching peasants grow things when was the LA so they're saying it in French but with a viking accent right because they stopped speaking German they started speaking French so just imagine you know like the the little thing I can't do it hard on that end people right something like that that means happy birthday um so get that going in your head but do it in French that must have been horrific for French speakers to hear this and they one day they're just like you know what dude let's go kill somebody now the original killing event they went to Spain actually and they captured barabos which today is Saragosa it was a Muslim City they capture it and they're like wow this is awesome so I need you to have in your head redhead and blonde head Vikings with long hair and braids and big beards right and they're just they're just you know they got an ax they're ready to hack people to death they get there and they see the Arabs doing philosophy and Math and Science and they go this is so cool they take off their Viking clothing they start wearing Jella bears and they walk around learning Arabic and they blend into Arab Society in Saragosa in Spain well word gets back to Normandy and the Normans are like man we could do this on a larger scale so a group of them get in a ship they sail all the way around Sicily I'm sorry around Spain to Sicily they get to Sicily they conquer it and then there then they have this really interesting situation because there's all these arabic speaking people living there there are there are people who are speaking Italian living there and they're Christian because they had converted right it didn't it didn't tone them down yet they get toned down later right they're still they're still a little sociopaths and then little by little they start to marry into German royalty this is this is complicated and eventually there's a guy named Frederick II if you look at coins from the time period in Sicily one side is in Arabic the other side is in Latin Frederick II actually had a bureaucracy made up of Christians Jews and Muslims and he learned Arabic he didn't just learn Arabic he spoke Italian and German and French and like I think two other languages the dude was just is that a polyglot I forget what the dev there's a polygot a polyglot anyway whatever it is he was that guy and he would read texts in the original Arabic and then sometimes he'd translate them in Latin he even did his own science he's so in love with the Muslim world that that after throwing the Crusaders out he was approached to see if he wanted the title of king of Jerusalem and he didn't send an Army in conquer it was just a symbolic gesture he eventually will become the Holy Roman Emperor which means he also owned Italy and Germany and he's spreading his ideas he got into Falcon raid right the quintessential Arab sport like he's out there with Falcons reading original Arabic script learning how to do this uh and it pissed off the popes he got excommunicated twice he led an army to Rome twice he conquered it and captured the pope and cut his head off a couple of times and instituted new popes a couple of times because all that sciency stuff that he was learning was apparently corrupting his soul but yeah it's the same time period it's the it's that moment when Italy is rethinking maybe burning the books wasn't a great idea so you have two ways of thinking about this you can pretend that Islam held on to Western civilization while western civilization was burning itself to the ground and then Western Civilization just reconstituted itself or you can realize the truth which is that the Arabs were Western Civilization all along the Islam didn't necessarily save something that it wasn't it saved itself it just took it to a new level the Arabs weren't doing something that was alien to them they were part of western civilization they even had a western civilization religion because right islamism abrahamic religion so they had all these Western Civilization Traditions when they conquered that part of Rome and Persia that was part of western civilization that had never stopped being Western Civilization what happened is you were taught it in an islamophobic way so all the Muslim parts were just simply deleted and so now we think of this as an East-West divide and somehow the Muslims are on the on the east side of it they're not that woman when she told me Egyptians are easterners she's just flat out wrong this is part of orientalism it's an attempt to make you see the world as US versus them it's not it's just not in Texas for example we do community property divorce we got that from Mexico Mexico is Catholic it didn't have divorce Mexico got it from Spain Spain is Catholic Spain didn't have divorce when the Arabs ruled Spain they got sick of all the deadbeat husbands who were divorcing their wives for younger models and then leaving the children to be raised by those divorced wives who no longer had a source of income so there are all these kids living in the streets so what what that what they did in Spain was they created a system where all the property generated from the moment of the marriage is start to the moment that the marriages and got split in half period end story that's community property law so you know you'll hear this thing that conservatives will say I'm worried about Sharia law well then don't get divorced because that's Muslim law the taco when the Spanish conquered Mexico they said make this the thing they were saying to make was Shawarma because the Spanish were Arabs they were just self-hating Arabs who rejected their arabness so they had flatbread food with meat in the middle and then vegetables and a sauce you put on it that they would fold like this the Aztecs go we don't have those ingredients the Spanish girl you're our slaves we're going to kill you make it anyway so the Mexicans went fine and then they made a tortilla and they put meat on it and they did a salsa because they needed the ingredients because they didn't have tahina and they were just stuck so the next time you're eating tacos remember that it's actually originally Arab food it's just a Native American version of Arab food al pastor you're like ah that'll work I'll eat pork that way I don't have to actually eat Arab food because Arabs don't eat pork so about a little bit less than 200 years ago 150 years ago Arabs started to move to Mexico those Arabs wanted to make Shawarma they're like my God tacos are basically just Shawarma how did that happen because they didn't know the original story so they're sitting there going ah I want to make the Shawarma with lamb I need a fatty meat there just isn't enough fatty meat and Park and saw the era of Mexicans if you've ever been to Mexico and you've eaten a whole Pastore off the thing it's the Shawarma thing but it's got pork on it in other words al pastor is Arab food twice we're all interconnected there's no separating any of this out from anything are languages like this Admiral is an Arabic word Zenith Nader algebra those are all Arabic words zero is an Arabic word apricot is an Arabic word there's no winning if you really wanted to do this because we there's no separating us out from each other okay so the question is why did Christianity reject all that philosophy and you know right set everything on fire at the same time that Muslims were embracing it I don't think there's a simple answer I think you know there's there's a historical moment that Christians found themselves in as the Roman Empire was in Decline right the Roman Empire almost went away in the third Century Diocletian saved it and reconstituted it by that point it goes christian and then on that as as the Roman Empire goes christian it's it's in a terrible position it's economies garbage um the population is poor the population is small Rome at one point was a million and a half people by the time we get to the sixth Century A.D there was about 50 000 Romans living in the city so so Rome itself was diminished and I think in that moment there was this sense of it's hopeless everything is falling apart around us let's turn to religion we'll focus on religion we'll just try to save our souls we're not going to worry about the material world and so I think that was the basis of the rejection that it came out of a sense of despair but in the in the same time the Muslims were making this brand new Empire they were filled with Vigor they had this new religion there was hope there were dreams they encountered philosophy and they fell in love with it and they ran with it and so I think there was a little bit of that going on because right then Christians go oh my God why do we burn all that and then they bring it back and the next thing you know Britain conquers 40 of the planet and so there's this pendulum switch and I I gotta say I like one end of the swing I do I love science I love things like antibiotics antibiotics are wonderful I love calculus I think it's a great thing you should learn it uh physics boundless love of physics when that pendulum comes swinging back the other way and we're setting books on fire and pulling them out of libraries in Texas it freaks me out because I've seen this play before I've read about it anyway I wasn't there and I know how this story ends and you're not gonna like it you're not we don't need to do this again we've done it before it wasn't great it wasn't great just for the record [Music]